Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computing, recursive ascent parsing is a technique for implementing an LALR parser which uses mutually-recursive functions rather than tables. Thus, the parser is directly encoded in the host language similar to recursive descent. Direct encoding usually yields a parser which is faster than its table-driven equivalent for the same reason that compilation is faster than interpretation. It is also (nominally) possible to hand edit a recursive ascent parser, whereas a tabular implementation is nigh unreadable to the average human.